Yahoo and Adobe plan PPC Ads for PDFs

In, what I think to be, an excellent development, CNET reports that Yahoo and Adobe have teamed up to bring pay-per-click adverts to Adobe’s Portable Document Format so that publishers can serve up ads contextually relevant to the content inside PDFs distributed on Web sites and over e-mail. To be honest I am surprised it’s Yahoo and not Google making a move like this.

The text advertisements appear in a panel to the right of the content in the PDF and are subject matter matched using keywords and analysis of associated concepts. The ads are dynamic, meaning different ads can pop up at different times and
clicking on an ad takes you to the advertiser Web site.

Publishers upload their PDF content into Yahoo’s ad serving system and then monitor the performance through Yahoo’s system. Publishers take a cut of the revenue from each click on the ads and Yahoo will split its share of the revenue per click with Adobe.

As Andy Beal says over on Marketing Pilgrim, this gives people who can’t decide whether to charge for their ebooks or give them away for free a third option that is a bit of a blend of option 1 and 2 and I think will be quite appealing.

Andy Speculates;

…this new service to make its current “convert documents to Adobe PDF” online service available for free. It currently charges $9.99 per month for the service, but it might be too tempting to offer the service for free, but on the condition that ads are added to the content.

Below is a screen shot from CNET showing how the ads will look – being displayed in the side column beside the main document.

1 Comment

On the one hand this development would mean more PDF websites. If your document has the ending .pdf it’s rated highly in the g-algorithm. And if you can earn money with ads being inside a pdf I would also consider publishing more pdfs anyway.

On the other hand let’s have a look at Google: The “I’m feeling lucky” button costs Google over $100 million a year (people don’t see ads by choosing “I feel lucky”…). This is one of the last great non-commercial benefits of the Google search engine. So let’s draw a parallel to Adobe: Adobe makes its pdf more commercial by integrating those in-document ads. I recognize this as a step forward to make useful tools in the web more commercial.
So the question is: When does Google start removing its “I’m feeling lucky” button?